The Salt Marsh Read Free Page B

the scar – and he was wearing a peace badge, you know, like the one Aunty Hazel wears.’
    Jim snorted, shook his head. ‘A badge doesn’t mean anything. Appearances can be deceptive. People aren’t always what they seem. You should know that by now. Anybody can pick up a badge and wear it.’
    He winced when he said that; she wasn’t sure why. She felt upset because it wasn’t her fault anyway. It was Jim’s. Why was he telling her off?
    â€˜He tried to give me a stick of candyfloss.’
    â€˜He what?’
    â€˜He tried to give me a stick of candyfloss. That’s when I knew he was a weirdo.’
    â€˜A stick of bloody candyfloss? Jesus fucking wept. What was he playing at?’
    He shook his head, mumbled to himself. ‘Talk about going for the soft target. A kid. What did he think he’d get from a kid? Wanker. Well, I suppose you don’t always know what you know.’
    She had no idea what he was going on about.
You don’t always know what you know.
She turned the words over in her mind, thought about the candyfloss, the colourless eyes, the scar face, the tightness in her stomach. She sang to herself while she was thinking, not conscious of what she was singing. ‘The Candy Man Can’.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
    â€˜Will you stop singing that bloody song,’ Jim said.
    They drove on in silence, circled the roundabout, past the skinheads hanging out at the bus stop, the fairy-light-bedecked bungalow where the tattooed biker lived with his ageing mother, turned into their street. Jim pulled up, hair plastered to the sweat of his forehead, yanked the handbrake on.
    She said, ‘He told me to tell you that you should take more care of me, otherwise something nasty could happen.’
    â€˜Fuck him,’ Jim shouted. ‘Fuck him.’ He opened the car door. ‘There isn’t a fucking handbook. I have to make it up as I go along. I get it wrong sometimes. Maybe this time I got it wrong.’
    She wasn’t sure whether he was talking to her or to himself. He got out of the car, slammed the door. She followed with the dog. He walked up the front steps of their house. At the top he stopped, turned.
    He said, ‘He’s an evil bastard. He might look normal but he’s a fucking evil bastard.’ He paused, then he said, ‘He is a candy man, that’s exactly what he is. A candy man spinning his sickly deceits. Using kids, for fuck’s sake. You’d better remember his face. If you see him again, don’t think twice. Run.’
    Jim went inside, left the front door open, left her standing on the pavement. She didn’t want to remember the candy man’s face, the icy eyes, the scythe-shaped scar. She wanted to forget him, bury it. Along with all the other things it was dangerous to remember about her father. A gust of wind carried a swirl of apple blossom along the road. She stretched, caught a white petal as the mini tornado passed, squished it in her fist, released the intense perfume of the blossom, sweet like candyfloss. The scent made her retch.

ONE
    20 June 1986
    F RIDAY EVENING, ALONE in the house: Dave her old housemate away in Skell, Luke her boyfriend doing a bar shift at the Wag. The room overshadowed by the Oval gasholder, its grey lung full. In the middle of the weekly phone session with her therapist; the last one before the memorial service that she had planned to mark the second anniversary of Jim’s death. The soft voice coaxed confession. She held the receiver to her ear with one hand and in the other she clutched a photo of her father, taken from behind, black and white. He had always avoided the camera’s lens, he did not want to be identified. She conjured up a memory of his features, tried to hold the image steady, but it slipped and faded into a recollection of his blank eyes staring up from the mortuary slab. He had been identified then, in the morgue, by